Perfect spin

August 2 2003

Despite spending all his free time on the fairway, Lloyd Cole claims to be keeping middle age at bay, writes Bernard Zuel.

For those who prefer their musicians wasted and dumb, Lloyd Cole blotted his copybook when he demonstrated he was a literate songwriter. On his 1984 debut album, Rattlesnakes, he name-checked Simone de Beauvoir, pronounced Eva Marie Saint the French way and talked about a girl who had been "sexually enlightened by Cosmopolitan".

To the literate tag you can add gentleman golfer, for Cole, who lives in the US, never leaves home without his golf clubs, his handicap (a respectable seven) and a list of golf courses in every town in which he will be performing.

"Touring is a strange thing in that if one doesn't put in the effort to try and make the most of the little free time, one can easily get the impression that there isn't free time and have a defeatist attitude about the whole thing and get depressed," Cole says from a hotel in Bristol on England's south coast (not far from a golf course), which he soon will leave for another hotel in Birmingham in the Midlands (near a golf course).

"I've constructed intricate schemes to make things possible. I had half a day in London the other day and I had my brother meet me at the airport and my A&R man at the record company take my golf clubs and we all converged on the golf course and got a round in before the sun went. We had a lovely time, we were all in a good mood and consequently my ability to perform [live] was enhanced because I'm not depressed."

Cole, or at least his image as the cafe habitue with a copy of Camus in his pocket, may not strike you immediately as the sporty type. It's hard to play a good game of rugger in a polo neck after all. But the boy Cole was indeed one for the muddy fields. At least for a while. ");document.write("

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"I played football until the age of 13 when my parents went to live near a golf course," Cole says. "I was at a school divided into four houses and that time coincided with the discovery by several players from the other houses that I was phobic about worms. So I'd be running along with the ball and one of the boys would pick up a worm and throw it at me and that would be it.

"But we did play team golf. The highlight of my entire sporting career was winning the deciding match for my club team."

If the talk of golf sounds terribly middle-aged then so be it. Cole is 42, happy enough with the fact and not afraid of writing about it either. Take his most recent album, Music in a Foreign Language, populated with many a character suffused with middle-aged ennui. There are women declaring "rather than company I prefer cigarettes", men drifting away from their moorings and perplexed adults wondering why their plans as 20-year-olds make so little sense now. In many ways they are people who are retreating from the world.

"I don't know that retreat is the way I would describe it but there is a feeling of ennui which is not as humorous as I thought it would be," Cole says with light resignation. "I joke about how this album was almost called How I Became Bitter because I almost understand that. I think it's possible now to understand how you can only be knocked down so many times before you start putting up fences to not let it happen again."

The album is not as gloomy as this suggests, of course. The gentleness of the melodies, Cole's carefully picked guitars and his voice - still constrained but always warm and engaging in its intimacy - combine to soften the blows. The lyrics, too, have little jokes, some of them self-directed.

Through it all there's a real sense that while some of these characters have given up, Cole, who has sustained an independent career, a marriage and a family well beyond his five years of fame in the 1980s, hasn't.

"I feel that I've spent a great deal of energy in my career and my public life resisting cynicism because I do think, not being a practising Christian or anything, that cynicism, the giving up of hope, is the closest I can think of to a sin. One has to find a way to go on."

But he does understand the flux of the fortysomething.

"I would say that the most frightening feeling that I experienced was that there was too much to do, too little reward and not enough enjoyment for it to be worth trying," Cole explains. "I almost got fat as well. I almost gave up trying to hold on to a body I used to have. Fortunately I did a photo session, looked at them and thought that's not good enough. I've dropped a stone and a half since then."

And before you throw in the accusation of shallow vanity, Cole is there already.

"I actually think that hideous vanity has been a big help to me because it has made me realise that certain things I thought I might have to say goodbye to I don't have to unless I want to," he says. "I'm pretty energetic right now, I go to the gym all the time. It's kind of a sad thought but I'd rather be a cliched 40-year-old going to the gym than a fat 40-year-old."

One reason for mid-life ennui is the fear that you've done the best you will ever do, something Cole addresses in the song Shelf Life and confronts every time someone only wants to talk about that debut album and not the dozen he's released since.

"I do find myself succumbing to delusions of grandeur at times, especially when I'm interviewed and reminded of things that I've done. And it's a repulsive situation because I don't like the concept of pride but on the other hand I do find myself singing lines and thinking no one else could write that line and it's perfect for that song," he confesses. "But there's no point me making music if I don't think that the music I'm making is going to be among the very best music of my time. Martin Amis said if you don't think you're the best you should give up. That's an exaggeration but one has to feel that what one is doing has substantial worth."

Rattlesnakes, in his case, was the best album that he could make as a 23-year-old but surely not the best album he could make now.

"I've actually found that the way I can think about my career most happily is to give up this idea that I did have when I was younger that we can create timeless art. When we were making Rattlesnakes, I wanted to make a record that you couldn't tell when it was made but I don't think that's possible."

This is a man who was writing songs about 40-year-olds when he was 22.

"Exactly, and I'm now writing songs about 70-year-olds," he laughs. "God knows what I'll do next; write songs about dead people I guess."

Music in a Foreign Language is out now. Lloyd Cole will tour Australia in November.